SOASTA Partners with CA Technologies for App Testing

Application testing services in the cloud and service virtualization should naturally be joined at the hip. In fact, once most organizations become aware of service virtualization they tend to acquire both technologies in tandem. Recognizing that simple fact, SOASTA this week inked an alliance with CA Technologies. Under this alliance SOASTA’s application testing service in the cloud, CloudTest, will be integrated with Service Virtualization and the CA LISA Test software suites sold by CA Technologies.

SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibus says the agreement effectively counters rival offerings from Hewlett-Packard and IBM that seek to bundle applications testing services and service virtualization software in a single offering.

In the age of the API economy service virtualization has emerged as a popular method for testing how an application will perform when it is dependent on calling any number of remote services. Rather than having to disrupt that application while running in production, service virtualization enables application testers to create a virtual instance of that application for the purpose of testing. Having that capability has already proven its weight in gold in terms of keeping the DevOps peace.

Given the scale at which mobile and Web applications are expected to operate at, it is nearly impossible for most IT organizations to create a test environment on their own capable of replicating actual production conditions. Application testing services in the cloud allow IT organizations to create scenarios involving millions of simulated users to determine the actual effect any one of those scenarios might have on actual application latency.

Perhaps more significantly, a survey of 200 in‐house software development executives and managers from enterprises with revenues of more than US $1 billion dollars in North America ‐ the majority (71%) with over $2 billion annual revenues – conducted by the market research firm Coleman Parkes Research on behalf of CA Technologies, found that not only does the inability to adequately test applications result in missed deadlines, entire functions wind up being eliminated and the development team as whole lacks confidence that the application will work as advertised. Couple that with the fact that most developers are judged on the performance of their applications and not having access to service virtualization capabilities during the development process is a recipe for almost certain developer discomfort once that application goes into production.

While most developers are familiar with application testing services in the cloud, service virtualization is an often overlooked. But at Lounibos notes, without service virtualization the development of the API economy will be seriously hampered.